Wednesday, May 13, 2009

More Options For Google Search

At Searchology event, Google announced new set of features and updates for search. The new set of features called Search Options, which are a collection of tools that let you slice and dice your results and generate different views to find what you need faster and easier. Search Options helps solve a problem that can be vexing: what query should I ask?

Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently. That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week.

The Search Options panel also gives you the ability to view your results in new ways. One view gives you more information about each result, including images as well as text, while others let you explore and iterate your search in different ways. Check out a video tour here:

Another update google made by making search results more richer. When you see your results from a Google search, how do you decide which one has the best information for you? Google refers the set of information returned with each result as "snippet". Some of these snippets are going to get richer with today’s announcement. These "rich snippets" extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range:

Here, you can quickly see that the Drooling Dog Bar B Q has gotten lots of positive reviews, and if you want to see what other people have said about the restaurant, clicking this result is a good choice.

Google also showed a preview of a new tool that they're calling Google Squared. Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn't find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We'll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs. Below video will provide more information on it: